Web414 WordPress Showdown

Had a great time talking about What’s New in WordPress 3.1 at the Web414 “Ultimate WordPress Showdown” Thursday. It wasn’t as pugnacious as it sounds, though. Scott Offord from OrionWeb demonstrated listing child pages, custom fields for arrays, and a couple SEO-oriented plugins (slides here). Jeramey Jannene made a simple plugin before our very eyes.

When my turn came, I looked really stupid, as I couldn’t get the laptop and projector to play nice with each other (Thanks, Ashe!). Once I recovered from that, it went pretty well. At some point, I think there will be video at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/web414-meetings-channel.

My publisher may not entirely approve, but I promised to offer links to posts I found really helpful in preparing my talk. It’s just coincidence that they both have books about WordPress:

One more thing: There was a positive response in the meeting to my proposal for a WordCamp in Milwaukee in 2011. I’ll be submitting a proposal to WordCampCentral this week. Watch this space for updates.

Thanks, Pete. We missed you too! As for the projector, when I used it at the PHP group some months ago, it wouldn’t work at all on the Linux side, but worked fine with WinXP. So of course this time I planned to use the Win side — and that didn’t work without much effort. But I’m over it now.